The nightlife in Istanbul

The colourful backstreets of Fener, originally uploaded by CharlesFred.

So, there we had it, our week in Istanbul, amazing how quickly it goes. We can only say that we appreciate even more the qualities of this great city than we had before as we continued to discover new areas to visit and particularly this time, more places in and around Istiklal Caddesi for eating and drinking. There are many many alleyways and narrow streets where they set out tables and chairs, where you can eat or drink. Some very basic, some very trendy. Inside and sometimes outside there are bars with live music, where eventually people will be singing along, clapping and dancing, not quite on the tables but almost. We went to a Kurdish bar, decked out like the inside of a tent, where a beautiful singer with black hair and a black dress sang folk songs accompanied by a guitarist and keyboard player. She sang very well (and we do prefer the women singers of Turkey to the men), singing requests from the public, with great joy in her eyes and in the meantime had two mobile phones which she was using very now and then to receive and send sms’es which was a little out-of-place.

The previous evening we had been to a gay bar, where the music was very loud, mostly electronic and coming from a backing tape, while the young singer walked around with his microphone singing powerfully and emotionally songs which seemed to be very popular again among the guests. The bar seemed to be a meeting place for young men with the most extreme forms of the hair-in-the-air style which seems so popular in Turkey. The (thick and dark) hair is brushed up above the crown and then gelled into various shapes. There was a whole table of them, about seven in a row all with this style. We noticed that you can go to a barber shop and get the barber to spend a couple of minutes with some gel and his hands in your hair to get a new style, for which you pay a half euro or so.